1.

Primal Stomp

One day in 1931 the rains stopped and the winds began.
A year later, millions of acres of ill-farmed, bone-dry topsoil began to swirl skyward,
fueling a seemingly endless procession of massive dust storms that swept across The Great
Plains and beyond, blanketing crops, roads, houses, cars and farm equipment with deep, drifting
layers of grainy, gritty earth.
In 1932, 14 major dust storms were recorded; the next year the number of “black
blizzards” grew to 38.
Then it got worse.
On May 9, 1934 a dust cloud rose out of the Midwest and quickly grew to 1,500 miles
long, 900 miles across, and two miles high. Lasting for more than 36 hours the dense dust cloud,
propelled
Eastward by strong, arid winds, affected more than one-third of the country and damaged or
destroyed 100 million acres of crops. According to the February 1935 edition of the Monthly
Weather Review, 12 million of the estimated 350 million tons of dirt displaced by this single
storm fell on Chicago. Dust fell like snow on New York, Boston, Charlotte and Washington D.C.
Contemporary newspaper accounts report that remnants of the storm coated the decks of ships
300 miles out in the Atlantic.
Then it got worse.
On the afternoon of April 14, 1935, which became known as “Black Sunday,” the 19th in
a series of dust storms that had been recorded in less than a month roiled and rolled out of
Kansas. This was the biggest, meanest storm yet. It plowed through the Texas and Oklahoma
Panhandles, blotting out the sunlight in the middle of the day, reducing visibility to nearly zero
and dropping even more tons of debris over the already desiccated land. Additionally, the
ongoing drought now affected more than 75 % of the country and was especially severe in 27
states.
Then it got worse.
As the drought and dust storms continued to sow widespread destruction, a vicious heat
wave descended on the Midwest and much of the East during the summer of 1936. On July 25,
the temperature in Lincoln, Nebraska soared to 115 degrees. Dozens of daily and monthly high
temperature records that were established in 1936 were still on the books seven decades later.
For millions of people, the summer of 1936 was literally a hell on earth.
 Unwilling or unable to wait out the unholy alliance of the environmental disasters of the
dust and drought and the economic disaster of the Great Depression that had been jump-started
by the stock market crash of October 1929, thousands of broke, tired, hungry and desperate
families packed up whatever belongings they could carry and left the ruined land behind, hoping
to salvage their ruined lives.
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